Sunday Evening Sanity with a Poet Provocateur and Banjo Wizard

Skip the doomscrolling and meet the amazing John McEuen and Andrei Codrescu

Whenever you need a break from the dueling pundits, have a listen to one of my Sunday Sanity shows. Here’s the latest - a conversation, poetry reading and picking party with a couple of remarkably creative humans - the provocateur poet

Andrei Codrescu

, who you may have heard as a frequent NPR commentator in decades past, and masterful bluegrass and trad musician John McEuen, best known for his 50 years in the legendary Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and for helping fellow high schooler Steve Martin learn banjo.

I owe much of my passion for guitar, banjo, bouzouki, mandolin and songwriting to the seminal Dirt Band album “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.”

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Andrei Codrescu has been a guest on many Sustain What episodes, including this particularly amusing moment discussing AI with transgender and online-rights campaigner and musician Evan Greer. I asked ChatGPT (early days) to write a poem in the style of Codrescu and had the poet critique it live on camera:

He has a brand new book of poems out, illustrated with some of his quirky photography, titled How to Live Under Fascism. Here’s one example:

Here’s his description:

My new collection of poetry is a guide to living in the dictatorship of the new American plutocracy. I was born and raised in Romania, a national-socialist client of the Soviet empire, where poetry was always a nightmare for the state, and a lifeline to the terrified citizen. I emigrated to freedom in the U.S, where the subversive powers of poetry were slowly dissolving into badly-payed entertainment for easily distracted readers. The surveillance of the market wasn't yet as deadly as that of the communist censors, but their merger seems a done deal now. In the face of this civic catastrophy poetry has to be more than eau-de-cologne to dispel the stink of army boots. This book is occasionally clear about that, but there are also poems of love and the plague, childhood scents, the warmth of other bodies, the warnings of history, and the pleasure of making things up. I was taking photogaphs on my daily walks when writing these poems, without meaning to use them, but then I saw that they were strangely and not so strangely connected. My mother and father were photographers in the bad old days, I think their craft shadowed me. I dedicate these works to my predecessors.

Here’s his darkly hilarious take on Trump’s grand plan for a military parade:

BREAKING NEWS: "A massive military parade planned in Washington next month will cost an estimated $25 million to $45 million and will involve dozens of war planes, hundreds of Army vehicles and thousands of soldiers from across the country... will be held June 14th, the day of President Trump's 79th birthday." The Washington Post, May 15, 2025

NEWER BREAKING NEWS: "The Arlington Cemetery Office announced a massive counter-parade of military ghosts killed in World War 2, Vietnam and Iraq. This will involve thousands of uniformed corpses, downed jets with pilots still in them, burning tanks, and untold mobs of enemy soldiers and civilian casualties holding signs in dead languages.

From One King to Another

You can learn heaps about McEuen (and Steve Martin’s music side) in this Rock Docs with Dennis Ball illustrated interview:

And here was McEuen performing on the Tonight Show with Martin guest hosting for Johnny Carson:

And click here to read how the “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” album came to be in 1972.

Please share this post with others and join the fun as a prelude to yet another week of Trump-induced trauma.

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